


What You Do With It

by sassmaster_tiresias



Series: Life As We Knew It [2]
Category: The Man in the High Castle (TV)
Genre: (okay maybe not SLIGHT but not MAJOR either, Angst, Backstory, Panic Attacks, Pre-Series, robert is a giant ball of anxiety and here's why, slight gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-17 05:15:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11268675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sassmaster_tiresias/pseuds/sassmaster_tiresias
Summary: "I’m going to tell you a secret, Bobby.  Being scared isn’t a bad thing.  It’s what you do with the fear that matters."





	What You Do With It

**Author's Note:**

  * For [queer_cheer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/queer_cheer/gifts).



> Two fics in one night, wild, I know! But Ollie really loves this one so I'm posting it for him. (I'm also proud of it and Robert is my fave SO.)

Before Frank Frink wandered into his life and royally wrecked everything, Robert Childan never knew anything outside of San Francisco. He grew up amidst the hills of the city, playing on the concrete steps that climbed them, workers smiling and stepping around him on their way home. When he was a child, he was happy, he had no desire to go anywhere else. When he was older, he was too scared to leave.

Technically, Robert is Robert Michael Childan, Junior. When he was born in the early years of the Depression, his parents, Robert and Margaret, had been better off than most--even when people had no money, they still needed food, and so Childan's Groceries was one of few businesses that hadn't gone under. It was out of a slight tinge of pride that they'd named their baby boy after his father, but they always called their son Bobby.

Robert had been too young for most of the Depression to stick in his memory. He could recall the later years, when things were starting to look up, just a bit. It wasn't long after that, though, that things had truly started to go to shit.

Robert Sr. had been drafted just in time to see the last year of fighting in the Great War, but that had been enough for him. When war broke out again, he was terrified, muttering "I won't go back, not again," under his breath as he worked the register at the store. He was scaring the customers, but even more often than they were frightened, people would glance back at Maggie with pity in their eyes. She couldn't bear the shame, and so she pulled her husband into the back of the store with her, letting her preteen son work the register whenever he wasn't in school. Bobby had always been good with numbers.

In 1944, the Childan family reached its breaking point.

It was late at night, and Robert had been asleep when he was awoken by his parents screaming at each other. 

"For Christ's sake, they don't want you anyway, you old bastard!" Maggie had bellowed. Robert listened to the sound of drawers slamming in his parents' room, feet stomping on the other side of the wall next to his bed. At thirteen, he was too young in the eyes of the adults to be involved in all the talk of war going on around him, but too old to be truly innocent of it. As his mother continued to shout, Robert crept out of bed, cracking his door open and watching their shadows move against the wall in the hallway.

"They're coming for me, Mags, I'm sure of it." Robert Sr. stalked out into the hallway. He had his suitcase in one hand, and the other fist was clenched at his side. He whirled back towards his wife, still in the bedroom, and his son caught a glimpse of his face.

Robert had never known what madness looked like, but now he knew. It was the spit congealing at the corners of his father's mouth. His pupils were pinpricks even in the half light of the hallway. His teeth were bared as he rounded on Maggie, and poor Robert's heart stopped in his chest.

"I'm not going back there." Robert Sr. waved his finger in his wife's face, and Robert saw her shadow cringe away. "Never again." He turns, walking into the living room of the apartment and grabbing his coat off the rack.

Maggie ran after him, dressed in her nightgown and with her robe flapping behind her. "And what about us? Huh, Robert? What about me and Bobby?" she snarled, shoving her husband and snatching the coat out of his hands. "You want me to go wake him up, tell him, 'We've got to go, baby. Your father's gone completely  _fucking_  crazy so we're running away to Canada!'" Robert shrunk away from the open crack of his door as his mother gestured towards it.

Robert Sr. Scoffed and rolled his eyes. "Of course not," he said. "You two have to stay here."

"You're just going to leave us?" Maggie's voice was soft, disbelieving as she looked up at her husband.

He reached out and stroked his wife's cheek, tracing his thumb around the dark bag under her eye. "I'll be back when this is all over, when we've won again. Okay? I'll be back for you, Maggie." He leaned forward and kissed her forehead, glanced towards his son's bedroom door, then turned and left.

In the silence that followed the click of the latch, all Maggie heard was her pulse pounding in her ears. The world was shaking around her like an earthquake, and she was the only thing steady. She felt like she was moving in quicksand as she tried to flex her fingers.

And then she heard it, somebody wheezing, coughing like they were trying not to drown. But the only other person there was...

"Bobby."

She threw open his bedroom door, and looked immediately to her son's bed. It was empty. Frantic, she looked around the room.

On the floor next to the door, Robert was sitting with his knees against his chest. He was staring blankly ahead of him, not even looking at his mother as she dropped to her knees at his side.

"Bobby, just breathe, baby, just breathe." Maggie pulled her son to her, pressing his head against her chest. "Breathe with me, honey, just like I am."

Eventually, Robert got his breath back, but neither he nor his mother moved. He was thirteen, practically a man in the eyes of this wartime world, but not quite. He spent the rest of the night in his mother's arms, but he never got back to sleep.

A year and a half later, when the bomb was dropped on DC, every school across the country was closed. Robert sat on the couch with his mother, watching the coverage of the aftermath on the TV. He clutched her hand, silent tears falling down his face from the effort of keeping himself from falling into another panic attack.

Maggie turned the TV off when it rolled around to lunch time. She sighed, and Robert followed her into the kitchen while she looked for something for them to eat. She put together a couple of PB&Js, all she had the energy for, and they sat down across from each other at the table.

“Mom, I’m scared,” Robert said.

She reached across, taking his shaking hands in her own. “I know, baby. I am, too.” Maggie wiped her tears against her own shoulder, never letting go of her son. “But I’m going to tell you a secret, Bobby. Being scared isn’t a bad thing. It’s what you do with the fear that matters.”

As she said it, her gaze shifted past Robert’s shoulder, towards the front door. She glared at it, as if daring her husband to return, and what she was silently telling her son was clear: _Be brave, Bobby. Don’t be a coward like your father._

And, God, did Robert try. He tried so hard to be brave, for his mom. After the war was over, after the Japanese had begun to move in among them in San Francisco, and all up and down the west coast, Robert tried. He did not flinch when the Imperial soldiers scrutinized him on the street, he simply raised his chin and put a protective arm around his mother’s shoulders. As word got to them about all of the people who were disappearing—the Jews, the African Americans, the homosexuals, all of the others—especially in the West with the Nazis, Robert tried not to quake with fear, not to break down.

But there is only so much a man can endure.

He was a man by then: twenty-two years old. It took the Japanese a while to gain control of their new territory. For years after the war, there was anarchy in the Pacific States—lootings, muggings, strings of mysterious deaths. All of this, too, Robert tried not to let break him.

But one night, he was at home. He had spaghetti on the stove; it would be done just in time for his mother to get home. She’d stayed back at the store to count the drawer and make sure they had everything they needed in the order that was going out tomorrow. He’d offered to stay with her, but she’d insisted that he go home, get dinner ready for the both of them.

Robert put two bowls of spaghetti on the table, topped off with his mother’s home made sauce. He glanced at the clock. It was getting on past eight, she should have been home by now. Maybe she’d run into one of their neighbors on the way, had been held up by the conversation. No big deal, surely.

He waited, and he waited. But his mother did not come.

Eventually, his heart pounding in his chest, Robert grabbed his keys and left the apartment. The store was just five blocks away; he’d be there in minutes. Surely his mom had just talked herself into taking inventory one more time, just to be safe. That had to be it, he told himself. Robert hit the sidewalk, and he ran.

The front door of the store was hanging open, the little bell jingling in the wind.

“Mom?” Robert called, panting, as he stepped through the door. There was no answer. “Mom, it’s me. Where are you?”

The shelves were in disarray. Things were missing, things had been trampled beneath people’s feet.

His throat was tight, and not because he’d run the whole way here. He tried to call out for his mom again, but no words could escape him. He felt like he was going to throw up as he staggered up one of the aisles, supporting himself with the shelves. As his clammy hand reached for the door to the office, Robert already knew what he was going to find.

Maggie Childan lay dead in the middle of the office floor, blood dripping from the bullet hole in her forehead, her stunning blue eyes, now dull, staring off into nothingness. The cash drawer from the register had been dropped next to her, a few pennies scattered about.

Robert’s lip quivered as his legs gave out beneath him. He screamed, gathering his mother’s body into his arms, clutching her against his chest. “No!” He sobbed, burying her face in her bloody hair. “No, please, God, no.” He raised his head, facing back towards the front of the store, and shrieked, “Help! Somebody, please!”

By the time anybody heard, Robert was soaked with his mother’s blood and his own tears. When the police arrived, they had to restrain Robert to get Maggie’s body out of his arms. He screamed the whole time.

The whole neighborhood had been drawn by the flashing lights, and everybody gathered around to watch as Maggie Childan’s son—the little boy they’d passed on their way home from work, the man who’d been ringing out their groceries since he was eleven years old—walk out onto the street, pale and shaking, his mother’s blood crusting in the lines of his palms.

Robert sold the grocery store. One of the neighbors, a kind old woman who ran a café and gift shop downtown, gave him a job. He sat behind the counter, selling chotchkies and booklets detailing what life in America had been like before the war to the young Japanese couples who came in for the novelty of milkshakes and French fries. He stayed in his apartment every night, too scared to go out into the world that had killed somebody as magnificent as his mother.

Every day, Robert thought of what his mother had wanted most from him. _Don’t be a coward. Don’t be like your father. Be brave._ He was too ashamed to show the world that he’d let her down.


End file.
